In a social context or setting, an address book is a useful tool for establishing social relationships between people. A typical address book contains a list of contact entries, with each contact entry comprising a list of contact information. Such information could include, but is not limited to, a name, physical address, email address, telephone number, personal identification number, instant messaging identifier, among others, which enables one user to contact another user. In addition to the contact entries, the address book system may also include a user's own personal contact information.
Growing innovation across services domain and mobile devices creates a number of ways to organize and manage contact information. With rapid growth in the usage of address books on end-user devices, the mobile industry has produced many different types of address book systems, associated data formats and protocols to manage the same. While this offers more choice to end users, it poses a very bad user experience and causes interoperability issues across differing address book applications. In other words, there is a lack of unified user experience and inconsistent user experience across devices with regard to address book applications, particularly for wireless mobile devices where optimization and efficiency of resources is important.
Several activities are under way within various standards organizations such as the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Converged Address Book (CAB), Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to provide a converged address book system. However, a gap currently exists in terms of defining an underlying system architecture and associated functionality that would permit users to manage (e.g. add, modify, delete), publish, subscribe, search, and share information as part of a converged address book system across various devices over a network. Interaction with legacy or external address book systems (e.g. importing data from other address book systems) is another key functionality of a standard converged address book system.
In particular a communication and access interface from the client to the server or network-based address book system is not specified. Current solutions are not optimal for a mobile device in terms of over-the-air (OTA) traffic and client complexity including memory footprint and data processing requirements. Existing solutions are also not adequate for dealing with requirements related to a converged address book system such as import data from legacy address books to converged address book system with user's request, searching for data stored in network data sources (e.g. XDM and non-XDM repositories), subscriptions to personal contact information of other users, and sharing contact information transparent to the user knowing the underlying techniques.